Ack! Please try to avoid using Telnet at all costs. As others have alluded to, telnet is plain-text traffic, allowing anyone with a network sniffer to steal your password and communication/data stream. You didn't mention what type of "network device" you'll be connecting to... if it's anything that will support SSH, please consider doing so. Using SSH will also allow you to predefine encryption keys so that the password exchange is unnecessary. Oh, and by the way... there is an EXCELLENT Perl module in Net::SSH::Perl. Use it! ;-)

-fuzzyping